Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 248

13.4.2 Direct vs. Indirect Verbal Insults

A verbal insult may be given in either a direct or an indirect way. An indirect insult
is a communicative verbal or bodily act in which the negative evaluation of T cannot
be understood by applying the bare lexical and syntactic rules of the language but
can only be inferred by taking into account, along with the literal meaning, the
contextual or cultural knowledge shared by the sender, target, and audience.
We distinguish two types of indirectness:

(a) Syntactic indirectness , where a sentence violates the syntactic constraints
mentioned earlier, but contains some insulting meaning that can be gleaned
from the presuppositions contained in a subordinate clause, a modifier, or an
attributive adjective;
(b) Pragmatic indirectness , where the insulting meaning can be discerned only
by applying a more or less elaborate path of inferences to go from the literal
meaning to the insulting one.

Indirectness may be a matter of degree: an insult can be more or less indirect
depending on how far it is from the aforementioned canonical form of insult and on
the number and types of inferences necessary to understand the insulting property
or category. Items (13) and (14) were cases of syntactic indirectness, (17) one of
pragmatic indirectness.

After the Parliament Chair, Laura Boldrini, applied a rule to cut off too
prolonged discussion of a law by the opposition, among Grillo's followers' sharp
comments, some are definitely insulting. A case of direct insult is

(16) E' fascista
(She is a fascist)
Then Grillo put a provocative question on his Facebook page, asking his
followers what they would have done had they been alone in a car with Boldrini.
One of the many harsh answers was:
(17) la lascerei al G.R.A. a battere , non sa fare altro .
(I would leave her on the motorway to sell herself , That's all she knows how to do)
This is a case of pragmatic indirectness: the insulting meaning implied is
“Boldrini is a prostitute”; but this degrading category is not explicitly mentioned
in the sentence; rather, it must be inferred by connecting the meanings of the two
sentences.

13.4.3 Direct and Indirect Bodily Insults

To insult people or institutions, words are not necessary: we may do so by gaze,
facial expression, gesture, or posture, or even without doing anything. Not to accept
an offer may be considered an insult - not only by a mafia godfather - and be